Trustful Trading in Shared Augmented Reality

If the Metaverse is the visionary space that is poised to greatly expand human activity, building of interpersonal trust within the Metaverse must be possible. Trust has been described as a "lubricative" for business, innovation, resilience, and even general enjoyment. In its most basic dyadic form, peer-to-peer trading of virtual items with the means of shared augmented reality should be possible in a trustworthy manner. Here, we investigate how specific design choices to facilitate such a trade impact trust. A user study with 36 participants showed that the entailment of a mutual confirmation of an item exchange improves both trust towards the software system, as well as interpersonal trust. We further found that perceived closeness towards the trade peer remains a much greater influence on trust than any other effect. We also found strong correlations between user experience and trust. In summary, our research shows that shared augmented reality can provide a great environment for trade and bartering among physically co-located peers, because potentially defrauding behaviours can be impeded by explicitly displaying item ownership and safeguarding the transfer of ownership.